Fliriting with a new Producitvity app

I was trying out a new productivity app over the weekend... one called Workflowy. I've flirted with Workflowy before and always come back to Remember the Milk (RTM). But... you know, they are always adding tweaks and improvements sooo... I thought I'd give it another shot. This happens to me on a regular basis. I find myself swamped in a sea to To-Do's and I think that a new productivity app will save me. Sigh.

So I started copying all of my To-Do's and projects from Remember the Milk (RTM) into Workflowy... which is essentially an infinite bullet list. About about half way through this migration, I realized... "You know what... this isn't going to solve anything". I could already see that Workflowy was going to frustrate me eventually because it lacked some key features, like being able to edit a swack of things all at once. So, I stopped the process and began to think... there has to be a better way.

You see, the thing with Remember the Milk is... I have all these great intentions about what I'm going to get done in a week or over the next month, and I schedule thing accordingly. "I'll do this on Monday and this on Friday and I'll put that into next week... and I'll put that two weeks from now." Which, when you think about it, is kind of crazy because things always come up that throw my schedule out of whack and then I start snowplowing To-Do's and I get into this frantic mode where I suddenly have 20 To-Do's scheduled for one day and I'll start madly postponing things by a day or a week or two weeks or three months. Which means I then have 40 things snowplowed into next week... and so it goes.

Like I said... there has to be a better way. My little affair with Workflowy did open up one possibility. Because Workflowy lacked due dates as a feature, I added tags like #nextweek #soon #nextmonth #someday. My idea was that each Sunday, I could review all the #nextweek tags and then identify what I was going to tackle on Monday... and then do the same for the rest of the week. Keeping my focus very narrow. Then, at the end of the month, I would examine the #nextmonth tag contents and identify things for the coming week... Or something... I hadn't worked out all the details but... I think I'm going to import that idea into RTM.

You see, RTM can already pull out things that are due Today and things that are due This Week... but everything needs an actual due date (October 27 or whatever). And, as I've already mentioned, that doesn't work great for me. And, with RTM SmartLists, I can make up my own category of things that I want to tackle #ThisWeek. And maybe I'll be tagging things with actual months.... instead of #nextmonth, it'll be #November, or something like that.

Finally, my daily to-do list won't reside in RTM but rather in my notebook with a max of three to five items. I do tend to overestimate how much I can get done in a day... sooo... I'm going to try to shoot lower and then, if I have extra time, I can always revisit RTM and pull out some other items. Or not... maybe I'll just read a book... or pet the cat...